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Warrior Forum War Room Review

There are some in the Internet marketing community who say you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany than the Warrior Forum. And, unlikely Mos Eisley, there are no cool space creatures to make up for it.

Although I think that the “WaFo” does have its valuable discussions and content (from time to time) because it is a free forum you can’t be too harsh on it … apart from the dreaded WSO section where the vast majority of products are just terrible.

But what about the Warrior Forum’s premium access area, called the “War Room”?

What Is The War Room?

Basically, it is an upgrade to your regular Warrior Forum membership. You pay a fee, and you get access to a bunch of extra content, features and tools that the hoi polloi can only dream of. Or something like that!

It is trying to be an exclusive forum, a bit like Wealthy Affiliate,  Stack That Money, or The Dojo. These are all premium forums that I hope to review in the future as well.

How Much Does It Cost?

Warrior Forum War Room Membership costs $8.08 per month … but it’s billed annually. That’s right folks, the old tactic of luring you in with a cheap sounding monthly rate and then making you pay it as an annual rebill is in full force here. Either give the annual price, or make it monthly.

For all intents and purposes, the price is $97 USD.

Btw, when I joined a few years back it was a one off purchase for lifetime access. And I’m pretty sure it was under $50 for that lifetime access. The perks of getting in early, I guess.

I haven’t seen any Warrior Forum War Room discount codes going anywhere either. Maybe they run specials from time-to-time, but I’m not sure.

Pros

  • SOMETIMES something useful shows up in the user submitted section. You occasionally see a gold nugget hidden in a free product thread, or in the product itself. However, this is about as rare as hen’s teeth.
  • Some of the AMAs aren’t bad (albeit many are dated). If you’ve got some time to kill, then you might find some useful tidbits of information in some of the AMA replays. There’s nothing groundbreaking in any of them, but worth a watch I guess.
  • Bigger private message storage. This is useful if you want to pitch/cold message to people on the main forum. For example, if you see someone posting about “what is a good article writing service” and you offer article writing, then you could pitch to them to hire you. I’ve landed some business this way in the past actually.

Cons

  • Free products are just user submissions. The War Room sales page makes it sound a bit like you are going to be receiving loads of premium products for your admission price. However, what you are getting for free are just products (think eBooks, video courses, WordPress themes etc) that other War Room members have decided to give away. Often these are old WSOs that have run their course, and now the owner is looking for a way to squeeze that last bit of value out of it. Other products are clearly just PLR that has had a new cover slapped on, or the regular lead hook the user would give away on their blog or website anyway. You would probably expect more high end products, but 99% of what is available are short little eBooks that usually sell for $10 or crummy WordPress themes that haven’t been updated in years.
  • Paying to have people try and bait you onto their lists and upsells. Although the rules state no forced opt ins on user submitted products, you will still find that just about every free guide, theme, plugin, or product you download will either a) try and jack your email address or b) try to upsell you to something. There’s nothing wrong with that at all really, but it just becomes tedious after a while. Combine this with the fact that everybody just comments on each others’ threads with one sentence comments like “yes, list building is important for profiting online” in order to drop their signature links, and it’s enough to drive you crazy. You’re literally paying to have people try and make you pay more! 
  • It feels like every guide is about making money from solo ads in the Internet marketing niche. As I mentioned above, the Warrior Forum has a terrible reputation as being a place people go trying to make money teaching others how to make money online (even if they don’t make any for themselves). This is a particular problem due to the Warrior Special Offer/WSO section of the regular forum. Unfortunately, the War Room doesn’t escape this fate. And just like the main WaFo the big culprit is endless guides to making money from solo ads. These are like the Internet marketing version of circle jerking. I’m sure there’s money out there in solo ads … but I wish people would stop spamming their “make $100 a day by buying lots of solo ads and building a list, and then selling your own solo ads” guides.
    • If you don’t know what a solo ad is, it’s basically where you pay to have an email sent on someone else’s list. This is really common in the Internet marketing niche, but not quite so popular in other niches.
  • There is only one special offer. Stickied at the top of the main War Room forum is a thread about member special offers. You click in to this, all eager to see special deals galore that will more than justify the cost of membership. But alas, there is only one deal. It’s 60 days’ free access to Moz Analytics. And that was posted all the way back in 2014!!! The special offers are DEAD, it seems.
  • No new AMAs for ages. At the time of writing, the last AMA I can see in the official stickied thread was Tim Paige from Leadpages on How To Hack Your Way To Better Conversions. This was published back in September 2015. So basically half a year ago. Stale, old, not fresh. What’s even worse is that some of the AMAs happened but recordings haven’t been uploaded. An example of this is an AMA with the man behind the popular 9gag viral site. Now I’d love to watch this because I’m interesting in monetizing viral niche sites. But nothing has happened in the 3 or so months since the AMA was done live – no replay is available and there doesn’t appear to be any response from the mods as to when it is going up.

Warrior Forum War Room: Worth It?

Absolutely not*. Total waste of coin and I would definitely not recommend it to anybody. The Warrior Forum has gone downhill massively

* If you are looking to sell products or services on the Warrior Forum (either through the WSO section, God help your soul, or the Warriors For Hire section which actually has some decent stuff going in it) then you could probably justify it. This is because War Room members tend to be viewed with more respect by forum users, and this might help boost your perceived trust level, which in turn could lead to more sales.

Furthermore, you get the benefit of having the Premium Warrior Forum access. This just gives you extra forum privileges, the most useful of which is the ability to have more private messages. This could be good if you’re messaging people to pitch services or JV ideas.

But to be honest, 99% of people reading this review are going to be better off avoiding the War Room.

When you consider you can have a tool as awesome as FPTraffic for about the same price – and it’s something that you can actually use to make yourself good income and drive traffic, you’d be a mug to spend your money on this.

Warrior Forum Review

One of the earliest resources I called upon in my digital marketing career was the infamous “Warrior Forum”. Just about everyone who dabbled in digital marketing (especially affiliate marketing) has spent some time on the Warrior Forum. It’s pretty much an institution – navigating the sea of posts on the forum is like a rite of passage.

In this Warrior Forum review I take a look at one of the world’s most popular online communities for digital marketers, and try to work out if there’s any value in spending time there.

Please note that this is a review of the free/public Warrior Forum. I have already reviewed the private “War Room” in the past here.

What Is The Warrior Forum?

The Warrior Forum is a popular forum for Internet/digital marketers (especially affiliates). It has been around for a number of years, since 1997 I believe – I first joined all the way back in 2007, and it was very popular at that stage.

It’s a place anyone can come and discuss:

  • Strategies and tactics for making money online
  • SEO
  • PPC advertising
  • Selling digital marketing services to offline businesses (so selling SEO or PPC or whatever). This was becoming a really hot topic when I first joined, as the early days of the WaFo was primarily focused around selling digital products from websites.
  • Copywriting
  • Product creation

Why Is The Warrior Forum So Famous?

Rather than doing my usual thing of splitting out my review into “pros” and “cons”, I want to have a more general discussion about why the Warrior Forum is so famous.

Pretty much anyone who has got much of a history in the digital marketing space has heard of or been a member of the Warrior Forum.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the fame and celebrity of the Warrior Forum is due to its being a hideout for three types of people:

  • Newbies.
  • Desperate “digital failures” who have spent years (and many thousands of dollars) buying up every training course and get-rich-quick-online scheme, but who have never made any real money.
  • Self-professed “gurus”.

It is the symbiotic relationship between the latter two that has cemented the less-than-positive fame of the Warrior Forum.

Basically, the forum is inhabited by a huge number of people who have a clear interest in making money online, but have never managed to reach their goal. For whatever reason (usually a lack of focus, or an inherent incompatibility to being an entrepreneur) they float from one method or strategy to the next – always just around the corner from their big break.

In most cases these people would have been better off working on up-skilling for a raise at work, or even picking up a second job and squirreling away the money into investments or savings. I suspect that many of the people who fit this description on the Warrior Forum probably earn significantly less than minimum wage from their endeavours, if they earn anything at all.

Warrior Forum “Gurus”

However, the real issue is that this is facilitated by the gurus on the Warrior Forum.

A guru is someone who makes money telling you how to make money. They almost certainly do not make any money from the methods they claim to be expert in (and which they will sell you access to for a big fat profit).

Gurus usually come from two backgrounds:

  1. “Fake it until you make it”.
  2. Had a bit of past success in SEO/PPC/affiliate marketing/copywriting and have realized it’s much easier and more profitable to make money teaching that than continue to do what they did in the past.

Whatever their background, almost all Warrior Forum gurus exhibit the same tendencies:

  • They never disclose any of their own projects that they claim result in them making money from the same methods they teach (this isn’t necessarily unreasonable, as if you disclose a winning affiliate site or project usually leads to immediate copycats). However, they are almost always deliberately non-transparent.

Warrior Special Offers (WSOs)

To be finished

Conclusion

Overall, I would recommend that you steer clear of the Warrior Forum. It really is a waste of time, and you will rarely see anything useful in terms of content on there. To find good content you really will need to dig quite deep, and you’ll wind up getting distracted by all the nonsense on there before you do find anything good.

A much better option is to check out digital marketing subreddits on Reddit (such as BigSEO, PPC and Entrepreneur). Another forum I also quite like is “Builders Society”. It’s not particularly active, but what is posted there is 10x better than anything posted on the Warrior Forum.